A Case of the Fake Brand X: Be Consistent in Your Branding

It’s hard to believe that there are still businesses lunched whose owners have virtually no understanding of the tools they have at their fingertips to make their brand known.

There are many aspects of this issue we could discuss, and there are concrete examples to illustrate all, but for the purpose of not hurting feelings, I will not name names. Instead, we’ll imaging the hospitality brand “Fake Brand X,” which has a good online presence, but it can improve on its branding across various channels.

For starters, on its website, Fake Brand X spells its name as FakeBrandX – probably because the domain is FakeBrandX.com, and they figured that spelling the brand as FakeBrandX would bring some SEO advantage. But customers are not bots. They are people, who understand the world totally different than a web crawler based on an algorithm.

Perhaps that SEO benefit was not what this business was after, because in Google Local (or Google Maps) this business appears as FakeBrand X. Notice the “subtle” difference?

Then you look at the business logo of this company, and you notice the name spelled as Fake Brand X – which should be the standard all over company stationery, on the web, promotional materials, and so on.

But the rules of branding are foreign territory for this business, which, on Twitter, appears as FakeX2000. And, before you ask, yes, FakeBrandX, the Twitter username, is still free.

On Facebook, this business doesn’t have a business page, but a personal profile instead. You have to become “friends” with this business. Since the number of friends for a person is limited to 5000, do you now understand why not having a professional business page on Facebook is, excuse my French, moronic? So, as a “person” you can only communicate with 5000 potential clients, whereas when managing a business page, the potential is limitless.

The moral of the story: if your logo spells Fake Brand X, be consistent, and spell your company name the same in all materials you hand out in public. Yes, you can have an @FakeX2000 Twitter alias, but make sure you don’t spell the name of the company on your Twitter profile the same. Customers may think that they have the wrong business, and they will go on looking for the true Fake Brand X.